A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005)

The title should pique interest. But big house publishing tends to be a conservative enterprise, where titles are often taken literally. To the editorial committee member concerned about a literal-minded consumer, the book is about tractors and is written in Ukrainian.

Concerns like this often come from Sales & Marketing, who have been holding sway in editorial meetings since at least the 1980s (If I can't sell it, why are we publishing it?). Sales & Marketing, like every department in a company that makes things, likes to have a hand in what it's selling, a hand that can be seen in the shape its product takes. I'm all for co-authorship, but ...

An industry produces products, a business produces profits. In big house publishing today, there are no loss-leaders -- every book is on its own and is held accountable. Publishers take their cues from Sales & Marketing, which is why Publishing, like most everything else these days, is not an industry but a business. 

On the cover we have the book's opening sentence and a half. The text is there to orient us, pull us in. What do we learn from it? The narrator's mother died recently. The father is in love with someone 48 years his junior. The love interest "exploded" on the scene, but not literally. Not a real "grenade," but a "fluffy pink" one.

Back in 2002, when Arsenal Pulp Press and I were partnered on an imprint (Advance Editions), we published Neil Wedman's Burlesck, a novel-in-drawings that Wedman re-drew, in his own style, from single panel cartoons, but without the captions. To prepare the reader (or to fool them into thinking the book is a novel-in-words), Wedman supplied an introduction that, borrowing from a style common to the books of his youth, has a portion of its opening text on the cover; in this instance, placed below a drawing of four men in what could be a 1950s editorial meeting. Not the first sentence and a half, but twice that. And these are long sentences. 

The first lines of Marina Lewycka's book -- the ones that pulled me in -- came after the first break in the first chapter -- lines that speak to a condition that is everywhere in our current moment:

"Perhaps it started before the phone call. Perhaps it started two years ago, in this same room where he is sitting now, where my mother lay dying while he paced about the house in an ecstasy of grief." (5)

In an ecstasy of grief. How true. I am almost want to say literally.